


Wolf Tone

by temporal-infidelity (gyabou)



Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canonical Character Death, Classical Music, Depression, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Recreational Drug Use, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-10 10:39:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18658762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyabou/pseuds/temporal-infidelity
Summary: “Everything about this world seemed wrong: all of the others were dead, and the Nathan he had known, as annoying as he was, might as well have been dead, too, because this person was nothing like him. His tone of voice, his manner of speaking, even something about his face just seemed wrong. It was as if Nathan were a shop that had gone out of business, and now it was just empty and dilapidated, haunted by old memories, with no expectation of a new owner moving in any time soon.”Takes place in the alternate universe Curtis accidentally creates in Series 1, Episode 4; except Curtis fails to turn back time and gets stuck there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know I have a million other stories I need to continue working on, but I haven’t been able to get this idea out if my head for weeks.

“I didn’t stop it …”

“Sorry? Did you know them?”

“I wasn’t there … I wasn’t there … I should have been caught, I could have stopped this!”

Curtis closed his eyes and waited for that sickening, rushing sensation of time rewinding to descend on him again. And he waited. And waited.

It wasn’t happening.

When he opened them again, Nathan Bloody Young, his face a mass of bruises and cuts and stitches, was staring at him peculiarly. The memorials to their friends were still before them. Alisha’s smiling face stared at him accusingly.

“No,” he whispered. “This can’t be happening.” Why wasn’t it working? Why couldn’t he turn time back this time, when he really, really needed to?

He’d killed them. He’d killed Alisha.

He couldn’t take it anymore. He turned and fled, leaving Nathan standing there, confused.

  


The next day he went back. Everything was still the same; the flowers were a little more wilted, and it had rained overnight, so some of the cards and things were curling in the moist air. He crouched down in front of Alisha’s memorial and stared hard at her face, thought about how much he’d wanted to kiss her, if only he could have. He wondered if it had been quick, if she’d suffered, how scared she’d been before she died. He wondered what the fuck was wrong with him, that these thoughts couldn’t make him go back and change things again.

“You’re here again,” a familiar voice said from behind him.

Curtis stood up and turned around. It was Nathan, of course, looking just as horrible as he had yesterday. “Was she your girlfriend or something?” he asked.

He didn’t know what he should say. “Or something,” he replied at last. 

“Sorry,” Nathan said, and his gaze slid off of Curtis and into nothingness, his eyes growing glazed. “I didn’t really know her, but sorry.”

Something about the tone of his voice made Curtis break out all into chills. He wanted to ask Nathan about Alisha’s last moments, but part of him didn’t want to know. And he didn’t think he should, for Nathan’s sake. He was clearly fucking traumatized by the entire incident. He’d never have imagined anything could traumatize Nathan Young, but he’d been wrong.

Maybe that was what was making him so uneasy. Everything about this world seemed wrong: all of the others were dead, and the Nathan he had known, as annoying as he was, might as well have been dead, too, because this person was nothing like him. His tone of voice, his manner of speaking, even something about his face just seemed wrong. It was as if Nathan were a shop that had gone out of business, and now it was just empty and dilapidated, haunted by old memories, with no expectation of a new owner moving in any time soon.

He cleared his throat. “I should get going,” he said. 

Nathan tilted his head and observed him. “Wanna go back to my house and get wasted?”

It was such a Nathan-like remark, coming out of that stranger’s face, that Curtis found himself readily agreeing before he knew what he was doing.

  


Nathan led him to a small suburb a short distance away, all the houses fairly identical. He chose one of them and unlocked the door. Nobody was home, it seemed. It must be his mother’s house, Curtis realized; Nathan must have moved back. He supposed your son nearly being murdered would make you forgive and let him come back home, even if that son was as difficult as Nathan.

Nathan’s bedroom was pretty much what he would have expected, a mess of dirty clothes, CDs, magazines, band posters and pin ups on the walls. On the nightstand there a bunch of overturned prescription bottles and hash pipe, and a plastic bag of pot. The whole room stank of it.

Curtis slumped on the unmade bed while Nathan filled up the pipe, lit it, and took a puff. He wondered what the hell he was doing here, why Nathan had invited him back in the first place, but that didn’t stop him from taking the pipe when it was handed to him and taking a toke. Meanwhile, Nathan rummaged around in a plastic bag on the floor and pulled out a six pack of warm lager and offered Curtis a can, which he also took. Nathan opened his own and used it to wash down one of the pills from his nightstand.

Curtis didn’t know what to say, and neither did Nathan, it seemed, because they just sat in there in perfect silence, drinking and passing the pipe back and forth. It was unnerving, being around a silent Nathan, but it was hard to get too worked up about it as the mellowness drifted in. Curtis took in more of the room, noticing things he hadn’t picked up on before: a large, unopened plastic bag of clothing on top of the messy dresser, with a label on it reading “Police evidence” with a release date of a few weeks before. There was a framed photo of a woman and a little boy, presumably Nathan and his mother, but the glass on the frame was broken, like somebody had dropped it, or thrown it, and it was on its side.

And in the corner of the room, resting against the wall, there was something Curtis couldn’t quite make out. Some kind of case, like a guitar case, but it was too big to be a guitar. He pointed at it, sluggishly, and said, “What is that?”

It took a moment for Nathan to follow his pointing finger and realize what he was talking about. “S’my cello,” he said around the pipe.

Curtis frowned. “Come again?”

But Nathan was standing up, passing him the pipe, and walking over to the case and pulling it out from the debris that surrounded it. It was covered in dust. He dragged it over to the bed, popped the latches and opened it, and lo and behold: it was, in fact, a cello.

“You play the cello?” Curtis said, faintly. He couldn’t reconcile that, not with the Nathan he knew, not with the room they were sitting in. It didn’t make any sense.

“Used to,” Nathan mumbled.

That didn’t make sense to Curtis. You either did something or you didn’t. He’d spent months not being able to run, in that other version of events, but he’d still been a runner. It was who he was.

“Play something for me.”

Nathan frowned. “I haven’t played this thing in years, it’s probably out of tune.”

“So tune it.” He didn’t know why he was being so insistent about it, but suddenly he wanted to see this odd version of Nathan pulling music out of this dumb wooden corpse, the way he used to pull exclamations of _fuck off!_ and _shut up, you wanker_ from them all with his insults and rude comments. And he was curious about this other side of Nathan, as unreal and unbelievable to him as the strange, empty look in his eyes, the hoarse hollowness of his voice.

As for Nathan, he stared at him curiously, then, with apparent reluctance, grasped the cello by the neck and pulled it from its coffin. The case thudded to the floor and Curtis leaned over and pulled it away. Inside the bow lay, along with a much crumpled and creased book of music. He picked up both and Nathan took the bow from him as he twisted the pegs.

The music was open mid-movement, and at the top of the page it said “Tchaikovsky”. When he looked closely, he could see tiny notes on it pencil, written in Nathan’s distinctive, left-tilting hand. It was like looking at heiroglyphics left behind by someone long dead.

Nathan slid the bow against the strings and eased his other hand slowly down the fingerboard. A stream of sound came from the instrument, starting out deep, then getting higher as his finger approached the f-holes, and then suddenly the sound turned strange, fragile, warbling, and that’s where he stopped, letting it hang there, making that terrible, vibrating noise for a moment.

“What the hell was that?” Curtis asked when he stopped.

“The wolf tone,” Nathan said. He was smiling, but it wasn’t his normal shit-eating grin; it was a funny smile, crooked and wobbly.

“What’s that mean?”

“Almost every string instrument does it. It’s when …” Nathan made a face, which Curtis couldn’t quite decipher for a moment; then he realized it was because he’d never seen Nathan make an expression like that before. It was the face of someone trying to explain something immensely complex that they understood but most people didn’t. It was the expression he probably made himself when he tried to explain tempo endurance to a non-runner, or something similar. Then it was gone, replaced by something almost like earnestness. “Okay, when you play a note, the string vibrates, right? But so does the body of the cello. A wolf tone happens when the note you play matches the natural resonance of the instrument, and they overlap each other and cancel each other out.” And then he did it again, adding as he did, “And it sounds like a wolf howling. That’s why it’s called a wolf tone.” 

“And you just can’t avoid it?”

“You can attach a wolf tone eliminator to the string, down where the bridge is. But I never did. I kind of liked being able to hear it.” He made the wolf howl one more time, then started doing what Curtis could only assume was some kind of warm-up exercise. When he was done, he reached out for the pipe and took a long drag, then handed it back.

And then he began to play.

Curtis didn’t know anything about classical music, or about the cello. He didn’t know if what Nathan was playing was particularly special or difficult, or if Nathan was playing it well. He might have been fucking up every note and Curtis would have been none the wiser. All he knew is that whatever he was playing sounded incredibly sad. He’d never really paid attention to what a cello sounded like, except in the vaguest sense, never dwelled on it. But now he was struck by how close it was to a human voice. A deep, pained voice, not like the wolf’s had been, but on the edge of it, just barely keeping its humanity.

Nathan’s hands seemed strong and competent as they worked the instrument, like maybe this was what they were really meant to be doing, rather than painting benches and smoking cigarettes and giving people the finger, the sorts of things Curtis had only ever seen them do before. When he was able to drag his gaze up to Nathan’s face, however, he stopped short. It was curiously expressionless and detached, not like the face of musicians he’d seen before, as though something were holding him back. The only change came towards the end, when music took a sharp, unexpected turn, and Nathan’s eyebrows briefly scrunched together with something like effort before smoothing out again.

When he was finished, they sat in silence, Curtis holding the pipe forgotten in his hand, and he wanted to ask Nathan had ever quit playing the cello, when it seemed to him he could do it so well, when the door to the bedroom suddenly opened and they both looked up.

It was a woman -- Nathan’s mum, it must be -- and she had the look of someone who’d just arrived home, her purse still perched on her shoulder. She looked surprised even as she opened the door, then even more surprised when she took in Curtis sitting there.

“I heard --” she started to say, then looked at Curtis curiously, and said instead to her son, “I didn’t know you were playing again.”

“I’m not,” Nathan said, even as he held the cello between his legs like a dumb corpse, the bow dangling from his loose grip and touching the floor.

She narrowed her eyes, but said nothing. “Who’s this?” she asked, not unkindly.

Nathan looked at him, one eyebrow slightly raised, and it was only then that Curtis had never told him his own name. Not this Nathan, anyway. How bizarre, that he knew so much about Nathan -- or thought he had, anyway -- but Nathan knew nothing about him.

“I’m Curtis,” he said.

“His girlfriend got murdered at the community center,” Nathan said drily.

“Nathan!” his mother said, looking horrified. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Curtis, and he wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for Nathan’s callousness or giving him condolences for his loss.

“Uh, it’s okay,” he mumbled. It was true, Alisha was his girlfriend, but at the same time, she wasn’t, not here, and he didn’t even know how to quantify that, really.

“Do -- do you want to stay for dinner?” his mother was asking him, but Curtis stood up.

“I should get going,” he said, then realized he was holding the still-smoking hash pipe in one hand. Awkwardly, he handed it to Nathan, who smirked, almost like his old self, but still not quite right, and put it to his mouth, looking at his mother as though daring her to say something. Which she didn’t.

 

 

Before he could make it out the front door, Nathan’s mother caught up with him. “You’ll come around again, won’t you?” she asked.

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “Sorry?”

“It’s just …” she pressed her lips together, and Curtis could see, suddenly, the strain on her face clearly. It must have been a terrible few weeks for her. Her son had almost died the day after she had kicked him out of the house. And now … well, Nathan was Nathan. He didn’t make anything easy for anyone, did he? 

“It’s just that he doesn’t see anyone,” she continued. “He doesn’t talk to anyone. He just sits in that room most of the day. Then he goes out and disappears for hours on end, doing God knows what. So you’ll come back, won’t you?”

“Sure,” he found himself saying, while a voice in his brain told himself to fuck off. He’d always had a weakness for other people’s mums, wanting to be seen as the good friend, the responsible one, wanting to be liked by them. But Nathan wasn’t even his friend. Particularly not this Nathan. But nevertheless, “Sure,” he said, and left.

He thought he was just lying, to make her feel better in that moment. He resolved to put this all away, to dedicate himself to his career and to his girlfriend, to forget the other world he’d accidentally erased, pretend it never existed. 

But he was back a few days later.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I think this is going to have more than three chapters. I have everything outlined but I have a tendency to overestimate how much I can fit into a chapter, lol. Not sure how many chapters there actually will be, but I'm thinking maybe five.

Here was the reason he came back:

Sam broke up with him.

After all of that, everything he’d done, the terrible mistakes he’d made, she came to his flat two days later and told him that she wanted to see someone else. It wasn’t him, it was her, and she couldn’t ever say how sorry she was, she hadn’t meant for things to turn out this way, she hoped they could still be friends, etc, etc.

He wasn’t crushed. He loved Alisha. But he felt … adrift. Purposeless. Even running didn’t make him feel better, didn’t free him from his worries. It just made him think about everything he’d traded to get it, and wonder if it was really worth it.

He hadn’t meant to turn up at Nathan’s again, he’d just gone for a walk to clear his head, and somehow he found himself in that same neighborhood again, in front of that house, ringing that doorbell.

Nathan’s mum answered the door. She looked, if possible, even more unhappy than she had when he’d last seen her. But at the sight of him her face visibly brightened, and that made Curtis feel like shit, because it was his fault that her and Nathan’s life were this fucked up, anyway.

“He’s in his room,” she said, without any preamble. “He -- he’s been shut up there all day, I think he goes out at night but I haven’t seen him. Maybe you can get him to talk to you.”

Curtis felt deeply uncomfortable with this entire situation, but he allowed himself to be herded into Nathan’s room by her anyway. Inside, it was mostly dark, the curtains pulled closed, and he could just make out Nathan’s huddled form on the bed, the duvet pulled up to his ears so that only tufts of curly hair were poking out. Was he asleep? Would he be angry if Curtis woke him up? He didn’t know, but he couldn’t just stand here in the middle of his room, the door slightly ajar, Mrs. Young off in the kitchen making tea and hoping he would somehow fix her broken son, as if he knew anything.

“Nathan?” he asked. “Nathan, wake up.”

The form under the blanket stirred, and then Nathan sat up, rubbing his eyes. He looked at Curtis strangely, as if he didn’t recognize him, then -- “Oh. It’s you.”

He wondered if Nathan remembered his name, as the only time he’d heard it was when he was pretty high. “Yeah. It’s me, Curtis.”

“What are you doing here?” It wasn’t said with any rancor, or even any real curiosity. Just a bland query.

“I was in the area,” he said, “Just thought I’d stop by. Your mum …” he trailed off. “Your mum thought you might want to see me.”

Nathan didn’t have any reaction to that. He stumbled out of the bed, dressed only in a t-shirt and boxers. “I gotta piss,” he mumbled, and brushed past him as he left the room to enter the hallway, presumbly going to the bathroom.

Curtis looked around the room again, then fumbled on the wall for a light switch. Everything looked much the same as it had the other day, except the cello case was now lying on the floor, ajar, with a pair of jeans draped over it. He shuffled over to the bed, unsure of whether he should sit on it -- it felt weirdly intimate, what with Nathan having just been asleep in it. On the nightstand he again saw the prescription bottles, and before could think about it, he’d picked them up and read the labels on the side. One seemed to be an antibiotic, another pain medication he remembered being prescribed himself when he tore a tendon. He wasn’t totally sure about the other two, but he thought one was an antidepressant, and the other might be sleeping pills, since the instructions said to take it before going to bed.

He put them back on the nightstand, hoping Nathan wouldn’t notice they’d been moved. Maybe this was why Nathan seemed so unlike himself. That was an awful lot of strong drugs.

When Nathan returned, he was sitting quietly on the very edge of the bed. Nathan didn’t seem to care. He rooted around in the pair of dirty jeans until he found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and stood there in his underwear and tshirt, smoking and staring at Curtis quietly.

“I’m going out,” he said, suddenly, making Curtis jump. He’d been deep in his own head, trying to figure out what he should say.

“Oh,” he said now, “I’ll leave, I guess.”

Nathan was pulling on the jeans. “You can come if you want,” he said, not looking at him. He found his sneakers and shoved them on without socks. He sounded nonchalant but there was something in his tone that made Curtis wonder if he wanted him to come. It was always a fucking guessing game with Nathan, even more so with this strange, quiet Nathan. With his Nathan -- and when had he started to think of him that way? -- he was always shouting and smirking and laughing, but half the time the shit he said was bullshit, bravado, and if you were careful, you’d notice something else going on underneath. He’d caught it a few times, and always thought it was kind of pathetic. Curtis believed in honesty. In being upfront with who you were and what you wanted. Not playing games, the rules of which you made up yourself and told no on else, and then being disappointed when no one else got the clues.

This Nathan wasn’t loud, wasn’t brash, but he still played those games, in his own way. Maybe he did’t know any other way to get what he wanted.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll come.”

Nathan only nodded, his face not betraying anything, but there was a slight loosening of his shoulders which Curtis thought might be relief. He grabbed one of the bottles from the nightstand and dry swallowed a pill, and Curtis tried not to look at it, not to be nosy. Then he grabbed his jacket off the back of the door and strode down the hallway, still smoking, with Curtis in his wake.

“Are you leaving?” his mother called out as they walked through the kitchen. She frowned. “Nathan, please don’t smoke in the house, I’ve told you --”

Nathan gave a dismissive sort of wave and breezed through the door.

“Uh, goodbye, Mrs. Young,” Curtis said, not sure of how to address her.

“Louise,” she said. “Thanks for coming by.” She stood in the doorway and watched them go; when Curtis looked back, he saw her watching her son’s vanishing back with a look of pain and worry. But there was nothing he could do about that. He had to run to catch up to Nathan.

  


Curtis thought they might head straight to the community center, but first they stopped at a corner shop, where Nathan bought more smokes and Curtis bought a bottle of water. Then he followed as Nathan walked, seemingly aimlessly, puffing away like a steam engine. This had gone on for about fifteen minutes when Nathan said to him, suddenly, “Tell me about your girl, then.”

His mouth went dry. “You knew her,” he said.

“Only for a day.”

He thought about that day, the things Alisha had said to him, the things she’d done -- that display with the plastic bottle, just like the one he was holding in his hand right now. Later on, she’d confided in him she’d done it just to mess with him specifically, to flirt. Without Curtis there, had she still done it? Who had she spoken to as they painted the benches? Had she flirted with Nathan instead? He hoped not.

“She was smart,” he said finally. “She liked to act like she wasn’t, and like she didn’t care, or like she wasn’t kind. But she was all of those things. She just … that was how she protected herself, I guess.”

He felt Nathan’s eyes on him, watching him. But Nathan didn’t say anything.

The silence made him bold. “Tell me what happened,” he said. “Exactly. I -- I want to know, I need to know.” Maybe hearing it would trigger his power. Maybe he could still make things right again.

Nathan was quiet for a minute, and Curtis thought he might not answer. But then he started to speak, his voice rough.

“That girl, Kelly, she came running in and told us that the probation worker’d gone mental, but we didn’t believe her. Made fun of her for it. I started to open the door, and she got between me and it, tried to close it, but he came barging in, swinging some piece of metal fencing or something, and he got her right in the head. She fell on the floor, I think she died instantly. We all tried to get away. He got that weird kid, what was his name --”

“Simon.”

“He got Simon next, I looked back and he was just going at him, like a fucking maniac. Then he grabbed your girl by the wrist and he went completely bananas. Pawing at her like a pervert. I grabbed a chair and hit him with it and got him off her. We both went running, but then -- I slipped on something on the floor. It was blood, it was all over the place. Later on I found out that he’d already killed that guy, Gary, stuffed him in a locker. That was his blood I fell in. Alisha tried to help me up and that’s when he got her. I got up and tried to jump on him, and he threw me against the wall. Everything’s kind of blurry after that. I just … remember her screaming, and then him standing over me and swinging that weapon of his, and then … nothing. Until I woke up in the body bag.”

“Body bag?”

“Yeah. They’d already pronounced me dead and were carrying me into the ambulance. Then suddenly I was awake and freaking out, I thought I was being buried alive or something, like in God damned Kill Bill. Gave the paramedics a real fright.”

Curtis couldn’t say anything. It was worse than what he could have ever imagined. He felt sick, his gorge rising, and he wished he hadn’t asked.

He didn’t realize he had stopped walking until Nathan turned back to look at him. “You okay, mate?” he asked.

“It won’t work,” he mumbled. “Why won’t it work?!” Try as he might he still couldn’t get that feeling to rise up in him, couldn’t make time rewind. He wondered if by changing the past, he’d made it so he’d never been struck by the storm, never gotten the power, and so forth. But that didn’t make sense. He’d had the power even when he’d been all the way back to that night at the club, before the storm had ever happened. He should still have it now. Shouldn’t he? Somehow, even though he couldn’t figure out how to use it, he felt like he knew it was there. He couldn’t quite explain it, but there was some sensation inside of him, like a stuttering stopwatch, dial endlessly hovering over a number, waiting to spring into action.

“What are you on about?” Nathan was asking, and suddenly, looking at that battered face before him, the last remnant of a ruined world, Curtis found himself telling everything.

“I was there,” he said. “I mean, I was supposed to be there, but I changed it all, and now I’ve ruined everything and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Nathan frowned at him. “No offense, man, but you sound crazy. And I’m well acquainted with crazy these days, so I know what I’m talking about.”

“I know about the storm,” Curtis said suddenly. It was the only thing he could think of to say to get Nathan to listen.

And it worked. Nathan froze and stared at him. “The … the storm?”

“The storm that happened the first day of our -- your community service,” Curtis said. “You were all struck by lightning, right? You, Kelly, Simon, Alisha, and Tony. And that’s when he started acting weird.”

Nathan frowned at him. “Did Alisha tell you about that?”

“No.” He looked around. They were nearly to the community center. He began to walk towards the building with determination, Nathan following in his wake. “Show me how you got inside,” he said to Nathan. “You said there’s an unlocked window.”

Nathan looked pale. “I never said that.”

“Not this time,” Curtis replied. “Before, I mean. Look, just show me. I already know. How your mum kicked you out, and you spent that night sleeping in here. How you were homeless.”

The other boy just stared at him for a minute. Then he walked around the corner to one of the windows, reached up, jingled it a little, and pushed it open. Then he stopped. “I don’t want to go in,” he muttered.

Curtis didn’t say anything. He just pulled himself up and slid inside. A few minutes later, Nathan followed, sans cigarette, which he must have thrown out.

Inside, it was quiet and dark. There were no signs of what had happened there, except for a piece of yellow caution tape tied to one of the inside door handles, accidentally left behind. He stopped in the entryway, wondering if he was standing where Alisha had died. He must be, he thought. Beside him, Nathan stood a little bit back, looking sick and afraid.

He followed the hall to the back entrance, where the door was boarded up. Tony must have broken it when he forced his way inside. Some of the tiling was newly cracked and broken there. Like something sharp had shattered it.

He turned to Nathan, who was still following him, a dazed expression on his face. One of his hands kept unconsciously traveling up to the healing scar on the side of his head, tracing along the stitches, before he realized what he was doing and dropped it. Then, a few minutes later, it would be back.

This was a pretty shitty thing he was doing, Curtis reflected. Nathan was clearly very fucked up by this thing, he shouldn’t be back in here, where it happened. But Curtis needed to see it, needed to convince him he wasn’t crazy, or lying, or confused. He didn’t know why he needed Nathan to believe him, but he did.

“Kelly told us -- told _you_ \-- that the storm did something to her,” he said. “She said she could hear what people were thinking, right?”

Nathan froze, then nodded, his eyes large and strangely dark in the dim light of the room.

“And then Simon said it had done something to him, too,” he continued. “He turned invisible in the locker room, and no one could see him. And you --” he grinned, painfully, “you told him to prove it, and then you fucked with him, pretended he really had turned invisible, and threw a soda can at him. You were sitting in a wheelchair. That’s right, isn’t it? That still happened, didn’t it?”

“How do you know that?” Nathan said. “Alisha wouldn’t have had time to text you --”

“Because Tony burst in right afterwards,” Curtis finished for him.

Nathan just stared at him.

“Kelly and Simon weren’t lying, or crazy,” Curtis said. “The storm did do something to them, and to Tony. To all of us.”

“Us?” Nathan said faintly.

“Simon _could_ turn invisible. Kelly _could_ read minds. Tony became some kind of rage monster, and Alisha -- Alisha made people want her, just by touching them. And,” he took a deep breath, “I can turn back time.”

Nathan made a sort choked laugh of disbelief.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “I know it sounds nuts, man, but it’s the truth.”

“You weren’t even there,” Nathan said faintly. “What the hell are you on about?”

“I was there,” Curtis said. “The first time. But then I turned time way back so that I never got arrested, never got community service, so I wasn’t there to save everyone, and this ... “ he waved his hand around, encompassing the empty community center, the places where their friends had died, “this is what happened. And now I can’t figure out how to fix it. I can’t turn it back. I don’t know how!” He threw himself down on a bench and put his head in his hands.

Nathan was quiet and still for a long time. Then he said, “What about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you all could do these things because of the storm, what could I do? I was hit by the lightning too.”

He shook his head. “We never figured it out. You tried everything, but if you have a power, I don’t know what it is.”

Nathan put his hands in his pockets and kicked at the floor. “Well, that’s typical, isn’t it,” he muttered.

“Do you believe me?” Curtis said.

Nathan shrugged. “Does it really matter? Either you’re crazy and made this all up, or I’m crazy for believing you. And I don’t really care.”

  


“So Alisha wasn’t really your girlfriend then, I guess?”

“She _is_ my girlfriend,” Curtis said. “Just not in this version of events. But she became my girlfriend, after all of this.”

They were sitting on the roof of the community center, just like they used to do. Or like Curtis used to do. Nathan had followed him up there a little curiously; to him it was an unknown space.

“Tell me about it,” Nathan said.

“What, Alisha?” Curtis wrinkled his nose. “None of your business, man.”

“No, asshole. I mean what happened before. After you saved us all with your amazing time traveling abilities.”

Curtis narrowed his eyes. Nathan almost sounded like himself. Perhaps that was why he started to tell him.

He told him about how Kelly had killed the probation worker, how they’d been scared they’d get blamed for both his and Gary’s deaths and so they’d had to hide the bodies, multiple times. He told them about how they’d learned about other people who’d also gotten powers -- the girl Kelly had gotten into a fight with, what he knew about the old lady Nathan’d hooked up with, and about Nathan’s mother’s boyfriend.

Nathan wrinkled his nose. “Ugh,” he said. “I’m glad she’s done with him.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, when I moved back he told her it was him or me. Real nice, considering the fact I couldn’t even fucking form coherent sentences for the first two weeks because of the brain damage. What was he worried about, me drooling on him? Anyway, she sent him packing.” Nathan lit up a new cigarette and laid back on the roof, while Curtis stared at him. It was shocking to think about how badly injured he must have been in the attack, considering how well -- physically, anyway -- he seemed now. It made Curtis think about a girl he’d gone to sixth form with, whose boyfriend had beaten her in the head with steel-toed boots while he was on an acid trip. She’d been in a coma for six months before she’d woken up, but she was never the same again. The fact that Nathan was up and walking around and smoking and snarking about his mother’s ex-boyfriend was a literal fucking miracle.

“So were we mates?” Nathan asked suddenly. “You and me? Best friends forever? Is that why you were so compelled to come and see me?”

“Hardly,” Curtis snorted. “You were a prick.”

“Ah, so you did know me then.”

Curtis shook his head, grinning. He looked over at Nathan, expecting that cocky grin of his beaming back at him, but Nathan wasn’t even looking at him. He was staring up at the sky, his mouth a straight line, like a reddened gash, the smoke from his last cigarette puff trickling through his lips, while he held his cigarette aloft, the ash perilously close to crumbling off on its own and falling into his hair. Curtis reached over and pulled that hand aside and tapped the ash for him. Nathan blinked and nodded his head at him, then went back to staring into the void.

Nothing was the same here, and he absolutely hated it.

**Author's Note:**

> [Here is what a wolf tone sounds like.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WolfTone.ogg)
> 
> The piece Nathan plays in this chapter is [Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Q2j7srAHs).
> 
> edit: fixed these links, sorry!
> 
> I’m not a musician so I apologize for any errors I’ve made.


End file.
